Think of a time when you perched a pencil behind your ear so as it have it handy as you went about your work at your desk. After a while you need the pencil, and you start to look for it all over the desk but can’t find it. When you do find the pencil, it is not because you were searching for it, but because you remembered where you put it.
Baptism is for the purpose of awakening within the one being baptized the localization of a prior, unbounded and eternal awareness or wakefulness of the truth, the reality that the whole field of one’s life is divine, is in God. This awareness was always there. This is the way it always was, but we had forgotten. This wakeful perception therefore goes beyond the limits of ego identification, beyond the known self.
In baptism Yeshua as the spiritual master works with his disciples to achieve in them their recognition that the self of the master and the self of the disciple are the same. That is, the very life of the master is the very life of the disciple. So if the disciple is received and fully recognized, the master will also be received and fully recognized. These are the words of Jesus in Matthew 10:40, Luke 10:16 and John 13:20. The goal of the discipleship process is to maturate individuals to be as he is as a witness and light to the world. This process is described in 1 John 3:1-2. The baptismal process is for our seeing him, recognizing and knowing experientially, so that we shall be like him, and thus also see like him, and see the wholeness of life in the Divine. It is not that wholeness of life is thus created or now comes into being. It is that this wholeness of life, this union pre-existed and is the foundation of all interpersonal dynamics. It is their relationship we awaken to.
The spiritual practice of meditation can serve release from attachment to specific forms of self-identification and self-validation. This is a process of loosing and expanding awareness. Yeshua as the master carries the responsibility to awaken the disciples from their state of spiritual unconsciousness of their prior union with the master. There is a strong inclination in us to create our own meaning associations with Yeshua, to hold onto precious experiences of him, to add drama to the process, and to desire or even claim an exclusive perception of the master in relationship to the ego self. This makes the ego bigger and moves in the opposite direction intended by the master in this process of awakening. That is why meditation is a central work in this process of expansion and release of ego identification. Only when we become willing and practice indifference to ego identification in meditation may the master’s responsibility to awaken be effective. This is the essence of baptism.
The baptism we are talking about here is not the liturgical rite for the sake of incorporating someone into the household of faith, but the process of realizing union with the One who baptizes us in Holy Spirit. And this union is not a merging of beings, but a singular wholeness in the unbounded self-being of God. Awakening then, we can say, is only the dissolution of the disciple in the master, the washing away of the self as separate and self-contained – gone, dissolved in the limitless ocean of unbounded Life.
Keep meditating!
Blessings in the Lamb,
Beverly
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